Situation

I joined a 2,200-person state public health department during COVID when demand for strategic planning, coordination, and alignment was urgent, but the organization was spending hundreds of thousands annually on external consultants with slow turnaround times and limited understanding of internal culture or staff experience. There was no internal capability to facilitate strategic planning, coordinate cross-program initiatives, or translate leadership vision into executable work. Staff morale was strained, and teams across the organization were operating in silos without a shared understanding of priorities or purpose.

Challenge

The organization needed to move faster, spend smarter, and create alignment across a highly regulated, politically sensitive environment. External consultants were expensive and often delivered recommendations that felt disconnected from operational reality. The challenge wasn't just building capacity, it was earning trust, understanding context deeply enough to make recommendations that would actually work, and elevating staff voices in a system where they were rarely heard.

Approach

I designed and launched an internal strategy and transformation consultancy from the ground up. This included building the operating model, securing executive sponsorship and budget, defining service offerings (strategic planning, facilitation, performance measurement), and training internal staff to deliver high-quality work that had previously required expensive external firms.What made this different from external consulting: we were insiders. We had access to institutional knowledge, understood political dynamics, knew which recommendations would land and which would fail. We could facilitate honest conversations because we'd built trust across the organization. We deliberately elevated staff voices in strategic planning processes, which not only improved the quality of recommendations but also dramatically increased buy-in and morale. Teams felt heard, leadership got better insights, and solutions were grounded in operational reality rather than consultant theory.

Results

The department saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually while improving speed, quality, and staff engagement. The internal consultancy became a trusted enterprise capability, delivering strategic planning, cross-functional coordination, and workforce alignment during one of the most complex periods in public health history. Recommendations were more accurate because they came from people who understood the work. Staff morale improved because voices that had been ignored were finally shaping strategy. The function I built is still operating today, sustaining the value long after my departure.

Lasting Impact

The organization replaced costly, disconnected external consulting with faster, higher-quality internal capacity. In the process, reconnected a fractured workforce to shared purpose and gave staff agency in shaping the future of public health during a crisis.

Situation

I joined an AI-enabled behavioral health technology company where the founding team had strong product vision, early traction with their AI chatbot and mobile applications, but no enterprise-level operating infrastructure to support growth or investor readiness. Product, operations, finance, marketing, and business development were working in silos with no coordinated execution, no board-ready visibility into performance, and no governance structure to manage tradeoffs or set priorities. Leadership was making reactive decisions without enterprise-level data, and the organization wasn't positioned for the Series B they needed to scale.

Challenge

The company needed to move from startup scrappiness to enterprise discipline without losing momentum. Investors and board members needed visibility. Leadership needed a way to coordinate work across functions and make strategic tradeoffs with confidence. The challenge was building operating infrastructure fast enough to support near-term fundraising while designing systems sustainable enough to scale beyond it.

Approach

I designed the enterprise operating infrastructure from scratch, the connective tissue that turned fragmented teams into a coordinated organization. This included establishing board- and investor-ready KPIs and executive dashboards, designing governance forums where cross-functional leaders could surface conflicts and make decisions together, and implementing 90-day strategic prioritization cycles that translated vision into executable work. I also built the go-to-market infrastructure: CRM systems, sales enablement materials, and revenue operations processes supporting launches into university, payer, and Employee Assistance Program markets. I translated complex technical and strategic tradeoffs into clear business cases so leadership could align quickly even when economic conditions and priorities were shifting. The work positioned the company to launch two B2C mobile applications and scale an AI-powered chatbot with seven-figure ARR potential.

Results

The organization moved from reactive delivery to enterprise-level clarity and control. Leadership had the visibility and governance structure needed to make confident strategic decisions. The company was positioned for Series B readiness with the operating discipline investors expect: board-ready metrics, coordinated execution, and a monetization model grounded in scalable infrastructure. The systems I built became the foundation for how the company runs, enabling them to grow without losing coherence.

Lasting Impact

A startup with strong product-market fit gained the operating infrastructure to scale,  transforming from a founder-led team making intuitive decisions into an enterprise capable of managing complexity, coordinating across functions, and executing with investor-grade discipline.

Situation

I stepped into a 17-location behavioral health system where enterprise technology, data, and analytics were managed by three separate teams operating independently with no coordination. Each team had its own priorities, vendor relationships, and decision-making processes, which meant the organization had no unified view of its multimillion-dollar IT portfolio, no alignment on platform strategy, and no coherent approach to security, compliance, or cloud migration. Investment decisions were fragmented, overhead was high, and service delivery to clinical operations was inconsistent.

Challenge

The organization needed to modernize its technology infrastructure, improve regulatory compliance, and reduce costs. Doing that required consolidating three independent teams with different cultures and priorities into a single function. The political complexity was significant: each team had leaders who valued their autonomy, and any consolidation risked losing institutional knowledge or creating resentment that would undermine execution.

Approach

I consolidated the three teams into a unified data, strategy, and innovation organization with a clear operating model, shared governance structure, and coordinated service delivery. I built trust by involving team members in the design of the new structure, clarifying roles and decision authority, and demonstrating early wins that showed consolidation would strengthen, not diminish, their work. I then led the modernization of the organization's multimillion-dollar IT portfolio: cloud transition, systems integration, vendor rationalization, and implementation of advanced analytics capabilities. I aligned all technology investments with regulatory compliance requirements (HIPAA, security standards) and clinical operational needs, ensuring that modernization didn't just reduce costs but actually improved service delivery to all 17 locations.

Results

The organization reduced overhead by 30% while strengthening service delivery, compliance, and execution discipline. The unified team operated more efficiently, made faster decisions, and delivered higher-quality support to clinical operations. The technology portfolio was modernized with clear governance over architecture, vendors, and security, positioning the organization for sustainable growth rather than continued fragmentation.

Lasting Impact

A fragmented technology function became a unified enterprise capability, reducing costs, improving compliance, and creating the infrastructure needed to support clinical excellence across a complex multi-site system.

Situation

I was brought into a state housing agency on a short-term engagement to solve an urgent operational problem: federal reimbursement dollars were stuck because months of required data submissions had not been completed. No one knew the scale of the backlog, how much money was at risk, or whether the external agency responsible for processing reimbursements would cooperate. Leadership needed the problem diagnosed and fixed quickly, but staff were overwhelmed and the work entailed engaging an external partner facing their own workload constraints.

Challenge

The backlog had accumulated over months with no clear record of what was missing or how much funding was at stake. Staff didn't have the capacity to clear it alone, the external agency was not able to fast track the work, and leadership had no visibility into progress or timeline. The challenge wasn't just clearing the backlog, it was quantifying the problem, securing external cooperation, deploying internal resources strategically, and building transparency so leadership could track recovery in real time.

Approach

I started by interviewing staff to understand the submission process and identify where it had broken down. Then I quantified the backlog, determining how many months of data submissions were missing and calculating the dollar value of stalled reimbursements. I coached internal staff on how to escalate the unresponsive external partner, helping them frame the conversation at a director level rather than continuing to wait for lower-level responses. That escalation resulted in dedicated resources from the external agency to process submissions. Internally, I built a burndown calculator that estimated the hours required per submission based on complexity, accounted for rework on rejected submissions, and modeled staffing scenarios to show leadership how many people were needed to complete the work within various scenarios or timelines. Staff entered data into the calculator as they completed submissions, giving leadership real-time visibility into progress, notes, and dollars recovered. I also trained the team on creation of standard procedure  and rapid onboarding materials (e.g., short videos, job aids, templates), so staff temporarily reassigned to the project could contribute immediately without lengthy training.

Results

The team cleared the backlog in under 7 weeks and recovered $4.8 million in federal funding that had been stalled. Leadership had real-time visibility into progress throughout the initiative. The external agency shifted into active engagement after the escalation strategy. Staff gained skills in stakeholder management and cross-functional coordination that strengthened future operations.

Lasting Impact

A multi-million-dollar funding gap was closed, immediate financial pressure was relieved, and the organization gained transparent workflows and escalation protocols that prevent future backlogs. All of this was delivered through a short-term, high-impact engagement that demonstrated the value of interim executive capacity.